Property Grunt

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Who Benefits?

Even Batman knows.

Christine Haughney’s article on fighting foreclosure has proven to be quite enlightening and a bit ominous for the real estate market particularly in Manhattan.In fact there were certain parts of this article that freaked me out.

SHERRI CAUGHMAN prides herself on being the kind of conscientious New Yorker who does her homework before making any major purchases. So when Ms. Caughman, 44, a supervisor in the city’s food-stamp program, decided last November to buy a two-family house in Jamaica, Queens, she took a class on buying real estate, researched the property through city records and vetted the terms of her mortgage with her former sister-in-law, a real estate broker.Ms. Caughman was also counting on help from her elderly parents, who would move into the downstairs apartment and help out with the mortgage on the $515,000 house. But three days after she closed on the house, her parents decided to move back to South Carolina. Suddenly, Ms. Caughman, who makes $40,000 a year, was left to pay a $3,699 monthly mortgage. In April, Ms. Caughman visited Neighborhood Housing Services after she missed her first mortgage payment. There, her counselor advised her to stop making mortgage payments and prepare to sell. To date, she has skipped three payments.

This is also happening in Manhattan.

In some parts of New York City, especially Manhattan, owners may even profit from these sales. Fourteen months ago, Michael and Bonie Bonilla bought a $1.65 million condo at the Chadwin House on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea with a $1 million mortgage. Mr. Bonilla, who runs a restaurant in the Hudson Valley, said that he and his wife bought the apartment partly as an investment. But Mr. Bonilla said they stopped making payments when his business slowed down. On April 23, their apartment appeared in public records as a pre-foreclosure because of missed mortgage payments to the Bank of New York. Now they are putting it up for sale. “It was too big of a mortgage, and business went down for me,” Mr. Bonilla said. “We decided to sell it.”

These are two people from two very different financial classes. Yet, they should be able to fend for themselves but they are still in a lot of trouble. What concerns me is the actions that are being taken, particularly owners missing mortgage payments. I do not recommend owners miss their mortgage payments. Even if you are about to sell, it is wise to maintain them best as possible. The simple reason is that your financial history is like herpes. It never leaves you. If you have a history of missing mortgage payments, it will come up in your credit report the next time you put in a rental application, apply for a mortgage, car loan even cellular service. The result will be either outright rejection or be forced to pony up additional money for security.

However, if you are in a no-win situation where you are literally on the razor’s edge and your finances are in complete shambles then by all means stage a strategic retreat. The key word is strategic. That means talking to your lender to do a workout on your mortgage. If that is not a viable solution and you need to liquidate, then figure out the best solution in selling your home whether it is using a broker or doing a FSBO. I would also encourage those of you who are on the verge of foreclosure talk to a real estate lawyer to determine what your rights. There are plenty of lawyers out there who are more than willing to give out free advice. You just have to look for them.

Ryan Slack, the chief executive of PropertyShark, said that foreclosure rates have always been higher in Queens because it has the highest concentration of detached single-family houses, which account for nearly 90 percent of foreclosures, he said. That, he explained, is because banks allow the buyers to take out large mortgages. Queens has more than 270,000 single-family houses, while Brooklyn has about 200,000 and Staten Island has about 100,000, according to PropertyShark.com. He added that owners of Manhattan condominiums, which often don’t require large down payments, could also run into trouble if there was a slowdown on Wall Street.“If there were a major problem in the job sector — particularly in the financial industry — I think you would see massive foreclosures in Manhattan condos,” Mr. Slack said.

I would have to concur with Mr. Slack. Manhattan is the Island of FIRE. (Finance Insurance and Real Estate) If anything occurs to dampen that flame we are f**ked. With the way the stock market is running, that may not occur for quite sometime. However that can change considering the reports on the state of our economy.

So far in 2007, courthouse filings for pre-foreclosures have doubled in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, according to Jessica Davis, the president of Profiles Publications Inc., which tracks and publishes these filings. She said that the average number of weekly filings in both Queens and Brooklyn jumped to about 120 in each borough from about 60 a year ago.Ms. Davis also sees more missed payments in Manhattan. For the first time in the five years that her company has tracked this data in Manhattan, she said, the number of weekly filings grew to about a dozen in the first quarter of this year, up from four a year ago. Many of these apartments carry million-dollar mortgages, Ms. Davis said, and she predicted that a tenth of these cases would end in foreclosure 12 to 18 months from now.“It gives me knots in my stomach to see these rates of pre-foreclosure,” she said. “This is not something to shrug your shoulders at.”

At one point there could be a critical mass of Manhattan foreclosures but I think a lot of the owner occupied apartments will in the pre-foreclosure stage for quite sometime. As for the selling option, I do not see that as a possibility since it is highly unlikely that owners will be able to command the prices that they desire.

Even if Manhattan owners sell, where are they going to go? Queens? Hells no. When you buy in Manhattan, you stay in Manhattan. Even if there is any money left over after they liquidate they are going to have a helluva time trying to find something comparable and renting in Manhattan is pretty much out of the question. They would have to move out of Manhattan in order to find something affordable.

So like the final season of Friends, these unfortunate owners are going to drag out the foreclosure process out as long as possible before the inevitable occurs.

It appears from this article that the optimal strategy is to sell. But why is this option being pushed? Why sell? Why not promote a mortgage workout?

From my perspective, the question that needs to be asked is “Who Benefits?”

The obvious person that benefits from a sale is the owners since they are able to release themselves from this burden of crushing mortgage payments. If it is not a FSBO, the brokers will definitely benefit from being able to sell a property that needs to go quickly and is attached to a desperate seller. However the party that benefits the most from a sale are the lenders.

Lenders also are eager to work out deals because they don’t want to be stuck with the expense of carrying and then selling foreclosed houses. A loan in default in the New York area can cost a lender at least $60 a day, according to Cynthia Rosicki, the founding partner in Rosicki, Rosicki & Associates, a law firm in Plainview, N.Y., that represents lenders. When banks don’t sell foreclosed houses at auction, they have to assume the costs of removing the owners or any tenants they might have. If they enlist the help of a real estate broker, they will have to pay a commission when the property sells.

It all comes down to cutting your losses. As stated above, time is money when a loan is in default. However not only is the bank losing money from missed payments but also they are losing money from the manpower and the resources needed to deal with a distressed property.

Even if a workout option is utilized, it is still going to consume a significant amount of resources. The five alternatives in a workout are the following1.Restructuring the mortgage loan2.Transfer of the mortgage to a new owner3.Voluntary conveyancy of the title to the mortgage4.Friendly foreclosure5.Prepackaged bankruptcy.

These alternatives are not free of charge for a bank and can be complicated and time consuming. By having the owner sell, all the costs of liquidating the property are in hands of the owner. They are the ones who have to take the wheel of the sinking ship and put out the capital outlays. And when the property sells all the lender has to do is collect their share of the profits and get the hell out of dodge.

In the last couple of years, lenders have already made a killing gathering these mortgages and bundling them as bonds for foreign consumption. The last thing lenders want is to be responsible for a bunch of liabilities. They already went through that bulls**t during the 80’s when people literally turned in their keys to the banks and walked away from their properties.

The lenders may take a hit on missed mortgage payments and the final sale price. But who cares? The owners are still on the hook for any other payments and even if they don’t pay, lenders don’t have to spend the money to baby sit properties till the next cycle or be prey for specialists in distressed properties who are highly skilled in getting these real estate diamonds in the rough at rock bottom prices from the clutches of lenders.

The next couple of years are going to be s**tastic. Expect stories about Manhattan owners whipping schemes to avoid foreclosure and other demented behavior. Also expect buyers getting sick deals from frustrated owners who are trading in New York to live in Providence.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Just checking in

The entries are a little light, but I have been busy with some personal stuff. Also I am still in Memorial Day weekend mode.

So enjoy this tasty press release about Governors Island. I will be back in full force in a couple of days.

“The park at the center of the world:

five visions for governors island” presents bold ideas for a new park and promenade at the center of new york harbor

American Institute of Architects New York Chapter and the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation announce exhibition featuring five landscape architecture and architecture teams competing to design compelling new open spaces for Governors Island

May 29, 2007. New York , NY. The American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY) and the Governors Island Preservation & Education Corporation (GIPEC) today announced a new exhibition featuring five visions for Governors Island ’s park and open spaces.

The five teams presenting designs at this exhibition have received critical acclaim for their buildings and landscapes around the world. They were chosen from a field of 29 teams representing 10 countries and 65 firms and they will compete to create a new park on Governors Island . The competing teams are:

The exhibition will open on May 31st at the AIA New York Chapter’s Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village, and on June 2nd on Governors Island . The designs illustrate concepts for a two mile Great Promenade providing breath-taking views of Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New York Harbor; a new “Summer Park” at the southern end of the Island; and restoration of the mature landscapes of the Historic District.

“We have a unique opportunity to create something special on Governors Island : a destination that preserves the island’s natural beauty and our country’s history; creates a public park that is a magnet for New Yorkers and visitors; and innovatively develops the remaining portions to support the island’s activities without burdening the taxpayer. We hope this landscape design competition will help jump-start those plans.”

“Governors Island can become the center of New York City ’s Harbor District through the creation of world-class open spaces and parks,” said Dan Doctoroff, the Deputy Mayor for Economic Development. “The designs presented at this exhibit provide the vision for achieving this opportunity.”

The competition process explores design approaches and preliminary ideas. Responses to the design brief will form the basis for the selection of the design team.

A jury of distinguished design professionals, government officials and citizens will convene this summer to review the design team’s submissions, and will consider the proposals along with public comments. The jury members are:

Carol Ash, Commissioner, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation

Adrian Benepe, Commissioner, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation

The Jury will recommend a winning team or teams, rather than a winning or final design. GIPEC will work with the selected team(s) to develop promising concepts for park and open space, with a process of extensive public input.

“We are excited about creating a 21st century park and open spaces on Governors Island to serve all our visitors, and this exhibition illustrates what those areas can be,” said Leslie Koch, President of the Governors Island Preservation & Education Corporation. “We hope that all New Yorkers will come to the exhibition and provide feedback about the designs and the competition.”

“The AIA New York Chapter is delighted to welcome design professionals and the public to the Governors Island exhibition at the Center for Architecture,” said Rick Bell, FAIA Executive Director of the AIA New York Chapter. “The five designs represent grand visions for making this wonderful and wild island a living part of New York City ’s landscape.”

"We hope that this is only the beginning of a process of revitalization for what can be a wonderful resource to the public,” said Joan Blumenfeld, FAIA, IIDA President of the AIA New York Chapter. “The creation of a unique waterfront park can mark the beginning of the development process for a Governor's Island that will be a destination both for tourists and for native New Yorkers."

Public input on the team’s designs will be critical to the competition and can be given in a variety of ways. Public comments will be received as follows:

At the two locations that the designs are exhibited – at the Center for Architecture in Manhattan , and on Governors Island Through Governors Island ’s website, www.govisland.com GIPEC will hold a public forum at 6:30 PM on June 20th at Reeves Great Hall at FIT ( 28th Street and 7th Avenue ) where the design teams will present their concepts and receive feedback from the public

The AIA will also host several programs and events at the Center for Architecture to celebrate the exhibition. These include:

· Monday, June 11th, 6 PM – 8 PM : Panel discussion with the AIA, American Society of Landscape Architects New York Chapter, Governors Island Alliance, and GIPEC. Sponsored by the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Additionally, the Van Alen Institute will hold an Open House and Conversation on the competition:

Wednesday, June 13th, 6 PM – 8 PM : “Designing Governors Island ,” The Van Alen Institute, 30 West 22nd Street , 6th Floor. As the future of Governors Island takes shape this spring and five internationally-renowned design teams present schemes for the site’s redesign, Van Alen Institute joins GIPEC and its partner organizations in celebrating the recent history of Governors Island, its relationship to the New York Harbor, and the role of design competitions in defining and developing public sites in New York City.

“The Park at the Center of the World: Five Visions for Governors Island” will be on view through August 25th at the Center for Architecture and through September 2nd on Governors Island .

Governors Island is open for visitors every Saturday and Sunday from June 2nd – September 2nd. For a ferry schedule and more information on events, visit www.govisland.com.

The New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, founded in New York City in 1857, is dedicated to three goals: public outreach--engaging and interacting with the public about architecture and the built environment; professional development--helping architects to be the best at what they do; and design excellence--improving the quality of design and advocating environmental conservation and sustainability. The AIA’s Center for Architecture

The Center for Architecture is New York City ’s storefront resource center for exhibitions, discussion and professional exchange on architecture and design. The Center is also home to the New York Chapter of Architecture for Humanity (AfH), the New York Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), Illuminating Engineering Society New York Section (ESNY), and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY). Located at 536 LaGuardia Place , the Center is open 9 am to 8 pm , Monday – Friday, and 11 am to 5 pm on Saturdays. Admission is free. For information contact the AIA New York Chapter at 212-683-0023 or info@aiany.org. (www.aiany.org)

The Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation is responsible for the planning, redevelopment and ongoing operations for 150 acres of Governors Island . The National Park Service administers the additional 22 acres of the island designated in 2003 as the Governors Island National Monument . A subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation, GIPEC is overseen by a Board of Directors appointed equally by the Governor and Mayor of New York . GIPEC is working closely with the National Park Service and a wide array of constituent groups, including business, community and civic groups, to foster new ideas for development of Governors Island and to enhance the island’s role as a vital and integral part of New York City and the surrounding region. GIPEC seeks to make Governors Island a destination with great public open space and heritage tourism attractions, as well as education, conference and cultural arts facilities. For more information please visit www.govisland.com or call 212.440.2202.

``It's a rather large, broad, sweeping request for enormous amounts of information on everyone we work with,'' Mitchell, Maxwell & Jackson co-founder Jeffrey Jackson said in an interview today. The appraiser, which evaluated about 20,000 properties last year in the New York region, said it received the subpoena ``about 10 days ago.''

Rising foreclosures throughout the U.S. have spurred state officials to propose consumer protection laws and mortgage refinancing programs to help homeowners. The number of homes entering foreclosure has hit an all-time high and the number of borrowers with poor or limited credit histories who are behind in their payments is the most since 2002, according to the Washington-based Mortgage Bankers Association.

You will all be happy to know that Miller Samuel has not been subpoenaed but Jonathan does present a sobering perspective on the situation.

New York appraisers Miller Samuel Inc. and Vanderbilt Appraisal Co., competitors to Mitchell, Maxwell & Jackson, said they had not received subpoenas.

Appraisers frequently face pressure to revise their findings, said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel.

What really got Jonathan pissed off was this quote by Jeff Jackson of Mitchell, Maxwell & Jackson (MMJ)

Because we are a large company were not as easily pressured as a small company might be.

Jonathan Miller's response was the following.

This phrasing seems to infer that the smaller an appraisal firm is, the more unethical it has the potential to become. I believe that size is not a proxy for insulation from pressure. Sure, a small firm can be pressured by small clients, whereas a larger firm is less likely to react to that type of pressure. I think that’s what Jeff was referring to and I agree with that example.

However, a large mortgage broker can inflict significant pressure on a large appraisal firm. Get the appraiser addicted to high volume and the potential to be influenced is just as significant. Small and large appraisal firms, like firms in any other industry, are always concerned about covering their overhead.

Every appraisal firm who does mortgage work, no matter what their size, is vulnerable to significant appraisal pressure.

The issue of appraisal pressure is why I got into blogging in the first place and started the appraiser blog Soapbox before I got the idea for Matrix. I can work up a good rant about the appraisal pressure issue with very little effort at a moment’s notice. One of my personal goals in life is to speak about appraisal pressure before Congress to explain what the problem is and how to solve it. Many of these ideas have been fleshed out in both of my blogs already. Of course, at the rate this is going, I may get my chance. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

but I digress…

I have had the pleasure of working with Miller's people in the past and they have proved to be quite knowledgeable, professional and generally quite pleasant. Which I think is a reflection of the firm and the man himself.

At the risk of sounding like an infomercial for Jonahtan Miller, the fact that he is willing to be this honest about his profession shows that is not willing to honey coat the problems of the appraisal industry. In fact he has the gumption to point out what is wrong and what needs to be done to correct it.

Last summer in Queens a hate Crime occured against a group of Asian men which was committed by a group of white men. Gothamist gives the rundown about the crime.

There was a trial and one of the attackers got 3 1/2 years in prison and one guy got probabtion. Below are links that gives the rundown on these crimes.

I know most of you are thinking why the hell should I care and what does this have to do with real estate?

First of all you shoudl give a damn. Whether a hate crime is committed against an Asian, Jewish, Latino or African American, it should not be tolerated. It is wrong. America is a country where anyone of whatever race, creed or color should be allowed to live in peace.

From a real estate perspective the outcome of the trial could have a potential negative affect on the Queens Real estate market.

Here's how I see it. Queens is a hotbed for Asians, particulalry Flushing. Now there a variety of reasons why certain demographics live in certain areas. A common reason is security. There is a general sense of ease when you are amongst your own.

When that security gets violated, people get scared, when people get scared they get angry, and when people get angry there is a possibility they might do something stupid.

For whatever reasons, the defendants were given sweetheart deals. I am not going to analyze why but I am sure after reading the articles you can come to your own conclusions.

What should have happened is that these two douchebags should have been given the harshest sentences allowed by law. It would serve useful for two reasons.

1. It would act as a deterrent from anyone else thinking of committing a hate crime.

2. It would reassure the community that the legal system also protects them.

The sentences that were handed maybe viewed as a slap on the wrist. For the people who that have the propensity of committing these crimes, they may figure that all they will get is probabtion if they commit a hate crime against an Asian.

And it is possible that some Asians may feel that engage in other acts of self preservation to protect their well being.

Asian people in Queens are a growing demographic in Queens and they bring in a lot of money. If they feel they are a target of violence, those that have the means will simply pick up and leave. The other that do not have those resources will take other measures, legal or otherwise, to protect themselves.

In other words, if a group of bored white kids are crusing down Queens Boulevard and spot an Asian in a car and decide to pull a Vincent Chin, they probably will get a very unplesant lesson on why Asians are so good at math when they are given a personal demonstration of the concept known as 2+1.

All of this results in causing an imbalance in the real estate market. Which is a very bad thing.

I know I will be accused of being an alarmist. But this type of bulls**t that f**k things up pretty badly for the market if they are not taken care of.

Below is the Center for Architecture schedule for the summer.

Center for Architecture

Exhibition and Programs Schedule

Summer 2007

Upcoming Exhibitions:

The Park at the Center of the World: Five Visions for Governors Island

May 31 — August 25, 2007

The exhibition features five landscape architecture and architecture teams selected to present their design visions for the future open spaces on Governors Island, the 172 acre Island off the tip of Manhattan . Governors Island’s open space will include the two mile Great Promenade that provides outstanding views of Lower Manhattan and New York Harbor , a new park, and restoration of the landscape in the Island ’s National Historic District. Showcasing conceptual and illustrative designs by the five teams for the open space of Governors Island , the exhibition provides a platform for public feedback before the jury will take place in late June 2007. A design team will be selected by mid summer.

This exhibition will highlight the work of 12 students from the High School of Art and Design that are taking part in the Studio@theCenter design intensive after school program. Studio@theCenter is designed to give high school students maximum exposure to one area of design through interaction with design professionals who serve as program mentors and instructors. Over the course of eight guided and open studio sessions students will: develop an understanding of the field of lighting design, visit a lighting factory and showroom, visit buildings where lighting plays a significant role in the design and feel of the building, and design and create their own functional lighting prototype.

Organized by: The Center for Architecture Foundation

Sponsored by: IESNY

Building Connections: 10th Annual Exhibition of K-12 Design Work

June 28 — August 11, 2007

The Center for Architecture Foundation's annual exhibit of K-12 explorations into the built environment showcasing models and drawings from Learning By Design: NY, a school based residency program, as well as work from its youth programs at the Center for Architecture.

Monday, 05/21/2007, 6:00–8:00pm Professor Pablo Campos Salvo-Sotelo introduces us to "Campus - Madrid " his latest book on the history, urbanism, and architecture of Madrid ’s 15 Universities. From past to present, the lecture will examine the planning of Madrid ’s universities for over 600 years. The focus on Madrid 's urban campuses promises to be particularly interesting to New Yorkers. "Campus - Madrid " identifies the essential questions that must concern every campus planner, urban designer and educator: To what extent does campus design support students’ social experiences and a healthy learning community? How central is student quality of life to the goals espoused by modern institutions of higher learning? How successful, how ‘alive’, are places on campus with respect to social vitality?Location: Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place (Directions)Price: freeCES LUs: 1

Wednesday, 05/30/2007, 6:00–8:00pmAs units of housing are in essence homes for families, we will take an interior look at how architecture can afford the crucial process of making space for oneself within designed spaces, neighborhoods and housing markets. What does it take for a life to flourish and can a building help or hinder this process? If social housing reflects the social covenant of a society, what is it to which every citizen is entitled? What does social housing in the United States say about our social contract? In conjunction with the "Making Housing Home" exhibition, please join a group of architects, environmental psychologists, policy-makers and architectural historians to discuss these vital questions.Sponsored by: Center for Human Environments, The Graduate Center, CUNY and in partnership with the AIA New York Housing CommitteeLocation: Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place

Saturday, 06/09/2007, 12:00–5:00pmThis design charette will examine New York City over the past 150 years and then give you the chance to design for the future. Working together, families and student teams will design future housing, transportation, and parks. Teams will have drawing and model building materials, as well as volunteers to help. At the end, teams will take part in a jury and discussion about their design proposals.Organized by: Center for Architecture FoundationLocation: Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place Price: $10 registration per team or familyTelephone: 212-358-6133More Info: info@cfafoundation.org

The Park at the Center of the WorldFive Visions for Governors Island Panel Discussion

Monday, 06/11/2007, 6:00–8:00pm The Park at the Center of the World: Five Visions for Governors Island features five landscape architecture and architecture teams selected to present their compelling design visions for the future open spaces on Governors Island, the 172 acre Island off the tip of Manhattan . Governors Island's open space will include the two-mile Great Promenade that provides outstanding views of Lower Manhattan and New York Harbor , a new park, and restoration of the landscape in the Island 's National Historic District.Speakers: Susannah Drake, ASLA New York Chapter; Robert Hammond, Friends of the High Line; Robert Pirani, Governors Island Alliance; Suzanne Wertz, AIA New York Chapter Planning & Urban Design Committee; Introduction by Leslie Koch, GIPECOrganized by: American Institute of Architects Planning and Urban Design Committee, American Society of Landscape Architects New York Chapter, Governors Island Alliance and Governors Island Preservation and Education CorporationLocation: Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place Price: FreeCES LUs: 1.5, CES HSW: 1.5More Info: http://www.govisland.com

Wednesday, 06/27/2007, 6:00–8:00pmARCHITECTURE / IDENTITY / COMMUNITY will conclude the series by looking at how brand strategies have affected the public realm, speculating on ways to create a more inclusive city, with economic opportunities for everyone, more affordable housing, and an improved quality of life in revitalized neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. This event will be combined with a book launch of Anna Klingmann’s book Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (MIT Press) describing how architecture can become an effective marketing tool for individual clients, corporations, and for cities in the 21st century.

Saturday, 07/14/2007, 1:00–4:00pmBring your building crew and get ready for skyscrapers - the ultimate challenge! Learn about some of the new innovations in tall building construction and then compete with other teams to build the tallest and the strongest skyscraper in timed competitions with limited materials.Organized by: Center for Architecture FoundationLocation: Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place Price: $10 suggested donation per familyTelephone: 212-358-6133More Info: info@cfafoundation.org

Saturday, 08/11/2007, 10:00–11:30amMeet at the Center for Architecture for a walking tour exploring Bleecker Street ’s unique structures including the only Louis Sullivan building and outdoor Picasso sculpture in NYC. There will be time and instruction on sketching and drawing along our route.Organized by: Center for Architecture FoundationLocation: Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place Price: $10 suggested donation per familyTelephone: 212-358-6133More Info: info@cfafoundation.org

Power House illuminates the people, projects, and public policies that fuel the affordable housing landscape in New York City . As New York City 's first juried design competition for affordable, sustainable housing, the New Housing New York Legacy Project (NHNY) is generating creative, replicable approaches to urban development. The exhibition focuses on the NHNY competition and sets it within the context of the city's efforts to preserve and development sustainable, financially viable residences for low- and middle-income New Yorkers. The show's emphasis is on the future of housing in the city, as represented by the competition winner, Phipps Rose Dattner Grimshaw (Phipps Houses / Jonathan Rose Companies / Dattner Architects / Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners), the four finalists, and the development mechanisms put in place by Mayor Bloomberg's 10-year New Housing Marketplace initiative and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Building on the 2004 New Housing New York Ideas Competition, the 2006 two-stage contest will result in construction of the winning design on a 40,000 square-foot Bronx site, which is valued at $4.3 million and was donated by The City of New York.

Curator: Abby Bussel Exhibition and Graphic Design: Casey Maher

Organized by: AIA New York Chapter, New Housing New York Steering Committee and the City of New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development with the additional support of the Center for Architecture Foundation and the AIA New York Chapter Housing Committee

Exhibition Underwriter: National Endowment for the Arts

Making Housing Home

Photographs with residents of New York City housing developments

March 22 — June 2, 2007

This photographic exhibition explores how people inhabit housing to create homes in two of New York City 's affordable housing developments, each of which were developed to provide good homes for all. Because units of housing are in essence homes for families, this project takes an interior look at what architecture can allow and support, to afford the crucial process of making space for oneself within designed spaces and housing markets. If social housing reflects the social covenant of our society, what is it to which every citizen is entitled? What does it take for a life to flourish and can a building help or hinder this process? What becomes of designed spaces once they are inhabited?

A showcase of the 2007 award-winning projects in three categories-Architecture, Interiors, and Projects. Selected from hundreds of international, national and local submissions, these projects spotlight the extraordinary achievements in architectural design excellence happening in New York City and around the world.

Exhibition and Graphic Design: Graham Hanson Design

Organized by: AIA New York Chapter and the AIA New York Chapter Design Awards Committee

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the founding of the American Institute of Architects in New York City , the AIA New York Chapter will feature an exhibition charting the transformation of the city and the profession from 1857 through the present and into the future. Genetic lines tracing the founding of the institute will intersect with various democratic and social movements and the architecture of New York 's civic structures.

Curator: Diane Lewis

Organized by: Organized by the AIA New York Chapter and the Center for Architecture Foundation

Exhibition Underwriters: IBEX Construction; NRI; Trespa

The exhibition is supported in part by an Arnold W. Brunner grant from the AIA New York Chapter

The Public Information Exchange (PIE) is an interactive website designed to create an archive of New York City projects, proposals, programs and exhibitions presented or discussed at the Center for Architecture. It will stimulate and record feedback for architects, planners, public officials, and the general public on projects with city-wide impact. The Center for Architecture’s programs and exhibitions explore a wide range of issues and projects impacting the city’s built environment. The Public Information Exchange captures that wealth of information and makes it navigable and accessible by the general public. PIE is a forum for public discussion, both general and professional that includes continuous commentary from users and participants. PIE can be accessed online at www.PIEaia.org.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

The Clueless German

Below is an email that was sent to me that I thought was a joke, then I realized this guy was serious. I have edited the email to protect the writer from any rightfully deserved ridicule.

Rent: 300-600$/month, up to 800$/month if nothing else available

My name is Hans Gruber. I'm a 25-year old German student doing an intership at the Insanely Expensive University of New York. From June 1 to August 31. I am looking for a room or a shared room, ideally on-campus or somewhere near Greenwich Village in Manhattan, or near Washington Square Park, most ideally for the whole three months, but I would not mind moving elsewhere if the room is not available for the whole time of my stay.

Rent should be about 300-600 $/month, but no more than 800$/month, if nothing else is available. I have no preference for any special kind of roommate, since I am a rather relaxed person and feel that I can get along with nearly any type of person.

I will have financial support from a stipend and rather good savings, so I will have a stable income for the time I spend in New York.

Some quick facts about myself:

I'm a graduate student of education science just about to finish my studies. I like to have my personaly space and respect that of others, but I am also rather open-minded and friendly as long as I am treated in the same way. I enjoy rock music, but either on headphones or on a low level. I am rather tidy, but I don't mind a roommate being not so much into tidying up. I don't necessarily have to be best-friends with my roommates, but I feel it is important that we do like and respect each other.

So, if you have a room that fits my needs - any place to stay from June 1 to August 31 at best - and think that you can get along with me, please contact me via e-mail I_AM_A_CLUELESS_GERMAN_EMAIL_SERVICES, I check my mails regularly.

Hans can absolutely find a sublet in Greenwich Village for 800 bucks. But he will need some really durable knee pads and have an appreciation for Turkish Prisons.

What baffles me is the fact that Hans actually thinks that he has a choice on where he lives. Somone has to sit him down and say "Dude, you're a f**king grad student. You don't get to decide where you live since you are poor."

It would be a miracle if he were able to achieve his apartment goals considering the fact that the rental market is so bad that we have college students from middle class families squatting in office buildings.

Brokers will stay the hell away from him as soon as they find out that he is only staying for the summer. Landlords want at least a one year term on their lease. As for his stipend and stable income,who cares? Even if a landlords is crazy enough rent to him, Hans is going to probably have to lay a desertation size report on his credit and finances. In fact he will definitely need a gurrantor. Also it is very unlikely that Hans will be able to pay the broker's fee.

If Hans wants to stay in his budget he will probably be learning more about the outer boroughs, particularly Red Hook and Flushing. Because those are probably the only places he will find a sublet at the price he wants. And with the Manhattan rental market being so brutal, I predict there will be a spillover into the sublet market and I wouldn't be surprised to see bidding wars over Manhattan sublets. It is going to be that bad.

For all of you foreign grad students who want to spend some quality time in Manhattan, don't be like Hans. Make friends with Americans from Manhattan while they are visiting your country so you can mooch off of them when you visit New York City.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Sound and the Fury

As all of you know how much of a noise freak I am. Well I was absolutely ecstatic when I saw this article in the New York Times about noise. It is not just the fact that there are solutions to deal with noise but to know I am not the only one with noise problems.

These companies are going to make so much money.

May 17, 2007The Dream of Absolute Quiet By PENELOPE GREENJONATHAN PRAGER is a 40-something Manhattan comedian and singer whose life experience and worldview, like those of many other comedians, are semitragic. Certainly, his quest to find a quiet home has been laced with pathos.

His last apartment, he said, was a living hell. He could hear the squeak of his neighbors’ faucets, the ring of their phone and the clatter of the plastic marbles their child would drop on the floor.

But Mr. Prager is made raw by all manner of city noises, from the squeal of a bus’s brakes to the bell the subway door makes when it closes (let’s not even talk about its brakes), from a jackhammer’s drill to the gum-chewing of the couple behind him at “The Drowsy Chaperone” the other night.

(He has a house in Connecticut, but he said he found no peace there, either. There are lawn mowers and leaf blowers and a neighbor’s pool with a noisy filter.)

In searching for a new apartment, he confounded brokers, he said, by rejecting sweeping city views or abundant light because he could discern the sound of the place’s elevator or the whir of rooftop equipment. He vetted his new home in a new building on the Lower East Side by wheedling his way past the super on successive visits to “just lie on the floor and feel and hear what it’s really like there.”

Broker-attended visits are easier, but brokers are always on their cellphones, he explained. This apartment is free of upstairs neighbors, by virtue of being on the top floor. Yet despite his due diligence, some issues have arisen since he moved in a few weeks ago.

“There are vents in the hallways through which air is sucked,” he said, “and that sucking noise is pretty loud.” And the construction work down the block is louder than he had imagined.

He has worked his way in and out of solutions: CitiQuiet, a New York sound-insulating window company, gave him an estimate for his floor-to-ceiling windows that came in at $10,000, rather steep for a rental. Then he consulted Mason Wyatt, a deep-voiced Southerner with a noise treatment practice called City Soundproofing, who cautioned against a full-on sound isolation package, again, because the place is a rental. Instead, he suggested his Silent Pictures, acoustical panels that can be hung on a wall like art, which start at $20 a square foot.

Like many before him, Mr. Prager was learning that domestic sonic bliss might be attainable, but at a price. Quiet has always been a luxury in cities. In New York, “neighbor noise” competes with outside noise to make noise complaints the No. 1 reason people call the city’s environmental complaint line.

Today quiet is even more elusive. With dozens of new buildings still on the drawing board in Manhattan and around the country, owners of new glass condos are recoiling in horror from the sonic fallout of the next glass tower being built down the block, or the roar of traffic heard through those beautiful glass walls. (Watch for New York City’s revised noise code, in place by July 1, which will put the onus on developers “to develop a noise mitigation plan prior to commencing work,” said Natalie Millner, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.)

This is why sales of sound-insulating windows at CitiQuiet are up 50 percent from two years ago, to over 10,000 windows in the last year, said David Skudin, the company’s president, who added that he has been outfitting glass towers like the Urban Glass House and the Bloomberg Building for wigged-out new residents.

And quiet is now the consummate domestic prize in the ever-expanding exurbs, where family members rattling around in cavernous great rooms and pursuing separate amusements — their TiVo’d movies, their pinging Xboxes, their YouTube-blaring computers — are driving one another crazy.

Ethnographers at Owens Corning have noted that families in new homes are “having more stress and changing their lifestyles as a result of all the interior noise,” said Harry Alter, a senior engineer at the Owens Corning science and technology center, explaining why his company cannily created and began marketing insulation products last year under the name Quietzone Noise Control Solutions. (Their trademarked slogan: “Volume control for the home.”)

“You had moms that would go into a bedroom closet to read a book,” said Portia Ash, the business manager for residential noise control at Owens Corning. “People with home theaters who couldn’t use them after certain hours because the kids were asleep. People who were working at home who were relegating their kids to the basement so their noise wouldn’t interfere with their ability to conduct business.”

These days new houses are noisier than ever, she concluded, because of their open floor plans, the abundance of hardwood floors and minimal carpeting.

The larger and more elaborate they are, the louder they get. Not only are there more activity rooms packed into them, from home theaters to bowling alleys to kickboxing studios (and who among us wants to hear the thwack of a foot against a punching bag at 6 a.m.?), they also run on the sort of powerful — and noisy — commercial systems that municipal buildings do.

Naturally, owners of houses like these can afford to avail themselves of the very latest in sonic technology.

Let’s examine one very, very large shingle-and-granite-faced house nearing completion on the North Shore of Long Island. It has all the usual flourishes: a sweetheart staircase with a 1,550-gallon fish tank behind it, a Ping-Pong room with a coffered ceiling, a model train room, a shooting gallery, a fencing room, a gym, a theater and a grotto. And, except for that grotto, each of its 30-odd rooms has been engineered for acoustical privacy, a fancy phrase that means quiet.

Last week Jim Gerold, the house’s contractor, and Steve Haas, its acoustician, described Mr. Haas’s “treatments”: the sound-absorbing plaster systems; the lead-lined Sheetrock and plywood (and the rubber clips and braces that “float” them); the fiberglass-lined ducts; and the range of resilient ceiling materials. Not that you could see any of these things.

“When I do my job well, nobody notices,” said Mr. Haas, who speaks quite softly and whose initials spell “SH.” He was wearing a dark gray shirt, dark gray pants and a dark gray silk tie with an airbrushed image of a saxophone on it. Mr. Haas’s background is as a designer of museum and performance space acoustics. For the past four years, however, his company, SH Acoustics, based in Milford, Conn., has focused on high-end houses like the one in Long Island, tweaking their many rooms to tame — this is a favorite word of his — the sound within them so that their owners no longer have to hear water rushing through pipes, toilets flushing, children running, televisions droning or anything else they would rather not.

Mr. Haas said his company is growing by about 30 percent a year and is now working on about 100 residences, including a 55,000-square-foot house in Australia. His costs, he said, could be anywhere from a few hundred dollars (to soundproof a wall) to six figures, as is the case for the Long Island house.

“For those who want all aspects of their new home conditioned for sound, plan on a 3 to 5 percent upgrade in the total cost of your home,” he said. “It helps if people can prioritize, like, ‘I want my bedroom to be a haven’ or ‘I want this home from start to finish to be quiet.’ ”

While a decorator creates an aesthetic ambiance, Mr. Haas and others like him work on a house’s sonic ambiance, making sure that conversation in a living room, for instance, is not too bouncy or “live” — too much like a noisy restaurant, for example. “Restaurant quality,” he said, making air quotes. “We don’t want that.”

Nature can be noisy, too. Years ago Jeffrey Collé, another contractor who works on Long Island, was asked if he could eliminate the sound of the ocean in the house he was renovating in East Hampton. He had been working with Billy Joel on his sound studio on Shelter Island and had learned a few things about acoustics.

“I applied the knowledge I’d had from Billy’s studio,” said Mr. Collé, who staggered studs, deployed a lot of lead-filled drywall and made windows using double-plated glass framed with Honduras mahogany. “But I wasn’t sure what the result was going to be until the end. And the bottom line was, you couldn’t hear the ocean.

“My favorite thing to do was to bring people to the house — it was all glass and the ocean was right there — and they would get this look on their face because you couldn’t hear anything. They knew something was different but couldn’t figure it out until I opened the doors to the roar of the surf. Then they got it.”

Anthony Grimani is the president of Performance Media Industries, in Fairfax, Calif., an acoustical engineering company. “I do think people have the right to live in places that have good sound privacy,” he said. “Especially high-end residences.”

He added, “When we’re working on the home theater I always ask: What about the rest of your residence? Does it have a comfortable feel sonically? I think people are more aware than they were 10 years ago,” but they don’t realize that without acoustic enhancements, “things aren’t going to be quiet, no matter how classy the place is.”

The cost of sound treatment adds $3,000 to $4,000 a room, Mr. Grimani said. “But that’s in a new house, while you’re building. It costs an arm or a leg if you fix it later.”

Acoustical privacy is an investment in mental health, he suggested, offering an evolutionary rationale. “You hear something, and flight or fight kicks in,” he said, “and you wonder what or who is creeping up behind you. You think, ‘Is it going to eat me, should I run?’ Sound is putting you in an evaluating condition all the time, and I would say that’s no way to live.”

It may also be that quiet is a moving target, and that what’s annoying and what’s pleasurable comes down to what’s in or out of your control.

Mr. Prager, the comedian, tells jokes about how the sound of hard candy being unwrapped makes him crazy and why a white-noise machine could never be a tolerable remedy for what ails him.

“I have jokes about that,” he said, “because you know how they use those in therapists’ offices? I have to ask the therapist to turn them off, along with their computers — there’s a little fan inside most computers that goes on and that’s annoying — and their air-conditioners. And then I can’t concentrate because there is always construction noise.”

Construction, he said, follows him around.

Mr. Prager has suffered deeply because of his sonic aversions. Relationships are complicated, he said (though it must be noted that his current relationship is a year old), and he ticked off some reasons: “Music playing in the house or a car makes me agitated,” he said. “I have to leave the house if my girlfriend blow-dries her hair. And it’s hard for me to go to restaurants because if I’m next to people who are screaming or laughing I can’t tune it out, and have to move tables, and that can be very annoying to the person I’m with.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Prager has just decided, in defiance of his own inclinations as well as a national trend toward obsessive quiet mongering, to learn to live with the noise.

“My girlfriend said, ‘If you can learn to adapt it will make your life better,’ ” he said. “She said, ‘This is not a silent world and you’ve got to learn to function with noise around.’ ”

And he really likes his new apartment.

Fingers in the Ears Are the Last Refuge

DO-IT-YOURSELFERS can tweak their sonic ambience in a few ways, said Steve Haas, the president of SH Acoustics, an acoustical engineering concern in Connecticut. But first the problem needs a proper diagnosis.

If sound in the room is echo-y — or “bouncy,” as Mr. Haas said, using a layman’s term for “reverberating” — that signifies an in-room treatment issue.

“Basically you need a way to stop the sound from reflecting around,” Mr. Haas said. Hard surfaces like bare walls, wood floors and sleek modern furniture reflect sound. “You need sound-absorbing material,” he said, “and that can take many forms.” Consider reworking the décor from midcentury modern to English country. Rugs are a good idea (wall-to-wall carpet being the most effective). For truly cavernous spaces, you can break up the sound with “funky chandeliers or hanging light fixtures,” he said.

To prevent room-to-room sound transmission, Mr. Haas said, it’s important to seal holes and gaps in and around walls with acoustic caulking that stays pliable. The best thing to do, he added, “is think about adding another layer of standard drywall to a wall or ceiling, or for further improvement, buying a special acoustic drywall called QuietRock that is engineered to damp sound vibrations.”

“What doesn’t work is putting fiberglass panels on a wall,” he said. “That only treats the sound in the room.”

May 17, 2007The Dream of Absolute Quiet By PENELOPE GREENJONATHAN PRAGER is a 40-something Manhattan comedian and singer whose life experience and worldview, like those of many other comedians, are semitragic. Certainly, his quest to find a quiet home has been laced with pathos.

His last apartment, he said, was a living hell. He could hear the squeak of his neighbors’ faucets, the ring of their phone and the clatter of the plastic marbles their child would drop on the floor.

But Mr. Prager is made raw by all manner of city noises, from the squeal of a bus’s brakes to the bell the subway door makes when it closes (let’s not even talk about its brakes), from a jackhammer’s drill to the gum-chewing of the couple behind him at “The Drowsy Chaperone” the other night.

(He has a house in Connecticut, but he said he found no peace there, either. There are lawn mowers and leaf blowers and a neighbor’s pool with a noisy filter.)

In searching for a new apartment, he confounded brokers, he said, by rejecting sweeping city views or abundant light because he could discern the sound of the place’s elevator or the whir of rooftop equipment. He vetted his new home in a new building on the Lower East Side by wheedling his way past the super on successive visits to “just lie on the floor and feel and hear what it’s really like there.”

Broker-attended visits are easier, but brokers are always on their cellphones, he explained. This apartment is free of upstairs neighbors, by virtue of being on the top floor. Yet despite his due diligence, some issues have arisen since he moved in a few weeks ago.

“There are vents in the hallways through which air is sucked,” he said, “and that sucking noise is pretty loud.” And the construction work down the block is louder than he had imagined.

He has worked his way in and out of solutions: CitiQuiet, a New York sound-insulating window company, gave him an estimate for his floor-to-ceiling windows that came in at $10,000, rather steep for a rental. Then he consulted Mason Wyatt, a deep-voiced Southerner with a noise treatment practice called City Soundproofing, who cautioned against a full-on sound isolation package, again, because the place is a rental. Instead, he suggested his Silent Pictures, acoustical panels that can be hung on a wall like art, which start at $20 a square foot.

Like many before him, Mr. Prager was learning that domestic sonic bliss might be attainable, but at a price. Quiet has always been a luxury in cities. In New York, “neighbor noise” competes with outside noise to make noise complaints the No. 1 reason people call the city’s environmental complaint line.

Today quiet is even more elusive. With dozens of new buildings still on the drawing board in Manhattan and around the country, owners of new glass condos are recoiling in horror from the sonic fallout of the next glass tower being built down the block, or the roar of traffic heard through those beautiful glass walls. (Watch for New York City’s revised noise code, in place by July 1, which will put the onus on developers “to develop a noise mitigation plan prior to commencing work,” said Natalie Millner, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.)

This is why sales of sound-insulating windows at CitiQuiet are up 50 percent from two years ago, to over 10,000 windows in the last year, said David Skudin, the company’s president, who added that he has been outfitting glass towers like the Urban Glass House and the Bloomberg Building for wigged-out new residents.

And quiet is now the consummate domestic prize in the ever-expanding exurbs, where family members rattling around in cavernous great rooms and pursuing separate amusements — their TiVo’d movies, their pinging Xboxes, their YouTube-blaring computers — are driving one another crazy.

Ethnographers at Owens Corning have noted that families in new homes are “having more stress and changing their lifestyles as a result of all the interior noise,” said Harry Alter, a senior engineer at the Owens Corning science and technology center, explaining why his company cannily created and began marketing insulation products last year under the name Quietzone Noise Control Solutions. (Their trademarked slogan: “Volume control for the home.”)

“You had moms that would go into a bedroom closet to read a book,” said Portia Ash, the business manager for residential noise control at Owens Corning. “People with home theaters who couldn’t use them after certain hours because the kids were asleep. People who were working at home who were relegating their kids to the basement so their noise wouldn’t interfere with their ability to conduct business.”

These days new houses are noisier than ever, she concluded, because of their open floor plans, the abundance of hardwood floors and minimal carpeting.

The larger and more elaborate they are, the louder they get. Not only are there more activity rooms packed into them, from home theaters to bowling alleys to kickboxing studios (and who among us wants to hear the thwack of a foot against a punching bag at 6 a.m.?), they also run on the sort of powerful — and noisy — commercial systems that municipal buildings do.

Naturally, owners of houses like these can afford to avail themselves of the very latest in sonic technology.

Let’s examine one very, very large shingle-and-granite-faced house nearing completion on the North Shore of Long Island. It has all the usual flourishes: a sweetheart staircase with a 1,550-gallon fish tank behind it, a Ping-Pong room with a coffered ceiling, a model train room, a shooting gallery, a fencing room, a gym, a theater and a grotto. And, except for that grotto, each of its 30-odd rooms has been engineered for acoustical privacy, a fancy phrase that means quiet.

Last week Jim Gerold, the house’s contractor, and Steve Haas, its acoustician, described Mr. Haas’s “treatments”: the sound-absorbing plaster systems; the lead-lined Sheetrock and plywood (and the rubber clips and braces that “float” them); the fiberglass-lined ducts; and the range of resilient ceiling materials. Not that you could see any of these things.

“When I do my job well, nobody notices,” said Mr. Haas, who speaks quite softly and whose initials spell “SH.” He was wearing a dark gray shirt, dark gray pants and a dark gray silk tie with an airbrushed image of a saxophone on it. Mr. Haas’s background is as a designer of museum and performance space acoustics. For the past four years, however, his company, SH Acoustics, based in Milford, Conn., has focused on high-end houses like the one in Long Island, tweaking their many rooms to tame — this is a favorite word of his — the sound within them so that their owners no longer have to hear water rushing through pipes, toilets flushing, children running, televisions droning or anything else they would rather not.

Mr. Haas said his company is growing by about 30 percent a year and is now working on about 100 residences, including a 55,000-square-foot house in Australia. His costs, he said, could be anywhere from a few hundred dollars (to soundproof a wall) to six figures, as is the case for the Long Island house.

“For those who want all aspects of their new home conditioned for sound, plan on a 3 to 5 percent upgrade in the total cost of your home,” he said. “It helps if people can prioritize, like, ‘I want my bedroom to be a haven’ or ‘I want this home from start to finish to be quiet.’ ”

While a decorator creates an aesthetic ambiance, Mr. Haas and others like him work on a house’s sonic ambiance, making sure that conversation in a living room, for instance, is not too bouncy or “live” — too much like a noisy restaurant, for example. “Restaurant quality,” he said, making air quotes. “We don’t want that.”

Nature can be noisy, too. Years ago Jeffrey Collé, another contractor who works on Long Island, was asked if he could eliminate the sound of the ocean in the house he was renovating in East Hampton. He had been working with Billy Joel on his sound studio on Shelter Island and had learned a few things about acoustics.

“I applied the knowledge I’d had from Billy’s studio,” said Mr. Collé, who staggered studs, deployed a lot of lead-filled drywall and made windows using double-plated glass framed with Honduras mahogany. “But I wasn’t sure what the result was going to be until the end. And the bottom line was, you couldn’t hear the ocean.

“My favorite thing to do was to bring people to the house — it was all glass and the ocean was right there — and they would get this look on their face because you couldn’t hear anything. They knew something was different but couldn’t figure it out until I opened the doors to the roar of the surf. Then they got it.”

Anthony Grimani is the president of Performance Media Industries, in Fairfax, Calif., an acoustical engineering company. “I do think people have the right to live in places that have good sound privacy,” he said. “Especially high-end residences.”

He added, “When we’re working on the home theater I always ask: What about the rest of your residence? Does it have a comfortable feel sonically? I think people are more aware than they were 10 years ago,” but they don’t realize that without acoustic enhancements, “things aren’t going to be quiet, no matter how classy the place is.”

The cost of sound treatment adds $3,000 to $4,000 a room, Mr. Grimani said. “But that’s in a new house, while you’re building. It costs an arm or a leg if you fix it later.”

Acoustical privacy is an investment in mental health, he suggested, offering an evolutionary rationale. “You hear something, and flight or fight kicks in,” he said, “and you wonder what or who is creeping up behind you. You think, ‘Is it going to eat me, should I run?’ Sound is putting you in an evaluating condition all the time, and I would say that’s no way to live.”

It may also be that quiet is a moving target, and that what’s annoying and what’s pleasurable comes down to what’s in or out of your control.

Mr. Prager, the comedian, tells jokes about how the sound of hard candy being unwrapped makes him crazy and why a white-noise machine could never be a tolerable remedy for what ails him.

“I have jokes about that,” he said, “because you know how they use those in therapists’ offices? I have to ask the therapist to turn them off, along with their computers — there’s a little fan inside most computers that goes on and that’s annoying — and their air-conditioners. And then I can’t concentrate because there is always construction noise.”

Construction, he said, follows him around.

Mr. Prager has suffered deeply because of his sonic aversions. Relationships are complicated, he said (though it must be noted that his current relationship is a year old), and he ticked off some reasons: “Music playing in the house or a car makes me agitated,” he said. “I have to leave the house if my girlfriend blow-dries her hair. And it’s hard for me to go to restaurants because if I’m next to people who are screaming or laughing I can’t tune it out, and have to move tables, and that can be very annoying to the person I’m with.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Prager has just decided, in defiance of his own inclinations as well as a national trend toward obsessive quiet mongering, to learn to live with the noise.

“My girlfriend said, ‘If you can learn to adapt it will make your life better,’ ” he said. “She said, ‘This is not a silent world and you’ve got to learn to function with noise around.’ ”

And he really likes his new apartment.

Fingers in the Ears Are the Last Refuge

DO-IT-YOURSELFERS can tweak their sonic ambience in a few ways, said Steve Haas, the president of SH Acoustics, an acoustical engineering concern in Connecticut. But first the problem needs a proper diagnosis.

If sound in the room is echo-y — or “bouncy,” as Mr. Haas said, using a layman’s term for “reverberating” — that signifies an in-room treatment issue.

“Basically you need a way to stop the sound from reflecting around,” Mr. Haas said. Hard surfaces like bare walls, wood floors and sleek modern furniture reflect sound. “You need sound-absorbing material,” he said, “and that can take many forms.” Consider reworking the décor from midcentury modern to English country. Rugs are a good idea (wall-to-wall carpet being the most effective). For truly cavernous spaces, you can break up the sound with “funky chandeliers or hanging light fixtures,” he said.

To prevent room-to-room sound transmission, Mr. Haas said, it’s important to seal holes and gaps in and around walls with acoustic caulking that stays pliable. The best thing to do, he added, “is think about adding another layer of standard drywall to a wall or ceiling, or for further improvement, buying a special acoustic drywall called QuietRock that is engineered to damp sound vibrations.”

“What doesn’t work is putting fiberglass panels on a wall,” he said. “That only treats the sound in the room.”

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Leave Me Alone (I'm Lonely)

Wall Street shot higher Wednesday after investors shrugged off a mixed reading on the housing sector and focused on the positives: a jump in industrial output, a retreat in crude oil prices and new cash pouring into the stock market. The Dow Jones industrials rose 103 points to another closing record.

It took me aback when I read this news. It wasn't too long ago that the market dropped to its knees faster than a White House intern after news of the subprime crisis.

It seemed the last thing that Wall Street wanted to be associated with was real estate.

I think this song by Pink sums up Wall Street's relationship with the housing market.

Leave Me Alone (I'm Lonely)

Go awayGive me a chance to miss youSay goodbyeIt'll make me want to kiss youI love you soMuch more when you're not hereWatchin all the bad showsDrinking all of my beer

I don't believe Adam and EveSpent every goddamn day togetherIf you give me some room there will be room enough for two

I don't wanna wake up with anotherBut I don't wanna always wake up with you eitherNo you can't hop into my showerAll I ask for is one f**kin' hourYou taste so sweetBut I can't eat the same thing every dayCuttin off the phoneLeave me the f**k aloneTomorrow I'll be beggin' you to come home

Friday, May 11, 2007

Stupid A$$ White Girls

Well it seemed fun at the time before all the landlords rejected us.

When the Grunt was a young lad, his parents enrolled him in art classes that were held in an art supply and frame store. At one class I was told a horrifying story by the teacher that occurred in the store.

One day one of the employees smelled a strong burning odor and immediately alerted the rest of the staff.

Now as innocuous as an art supply and frame store may seem, they are actually a huge hazard considering the flammable chemicals, paints and copious amounts of wood they store. In other words one spark and you got yourself a towering inferno.

Needless to say, the staff went completely nuts trying to figure out what was burning but they couldn’t find anything in the store. Then it got really interesting when the fire trucks came on the scene. Apparently they were not the only ones who smelled something was on fire. It turned out the culprit was their next door neighbor which was a shoe repair store. Apparently the owner forgot to turn his hot plate off which ended up toasting up some leather.

Why, pray tell did this man have a hot plate in his store and risk burning the whole block down? Because the idiot was using the store as his home.

May 10, 2007New York City Renters Cope With Squeeze By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEYLike the legions of aspiring poets, tap dancers and musicians who came before her, Nina Rubin, a 29-year-old graduate of Wesleyan University, has struggled to find halfway decent housing in New York. Earlier this year, she ended up in her most unusual home yet: an office.

After taking a job as an instructor at Outward Bound, Ms. Rubin, along with some of her co-workers, settled into the top floor of the organization’s Long Island City headquarters. She camped out in a bunk bed; others converted nearby office cubicles into sleeping spaces, or pitched tents on the building’s roof. To create some privacy, they hung towels and sheets around their bunks.

While Outward Bound officials stress that they view these cubicles and tents as temporary housing solutions, Ms. Rubin, who has since moved to Vermont for a short while, was grateful for a free place.

I empathize with Ms. Rubin’s plight. I have met many a client unable to either afford the rent or the fee or both. It sucks. So you make do with what you can. And although it is admirable for how she and her friends have adapted to their new environment, but the fact that you have to live in an office cubicle says a lot about your occupation and choices in life.

As the apartment-huntitng season begins, fueled by college graduates and other new arrivals, real estate brokers say radical solutions among young, well-educated newcomers to the city are becoming more common, because New York’s rental market is the tightest it has been in seven years. High-paid bankers and corporate lawyers snap up the few available apartments, often leading more modestly paid professionals and students to resort to desperate measures to find homes.

Obviously this is a huge issue in New York City which is why the Bloomberg Administration has hit the ground running providing affordable housing. Unfortunately it will be quite a while until the affordable housing stock can keep up with the demand. In the meantime, New Yorkers get creative.

While young people in New York have always sought roommates to make life more affordable, they are now crowding so tightly into doorman buildings in prime neighborhoods like the Upper East Side that they may violate city codes.

They are doing so in part because the vacancy rate for Manhattan rentals is now estimated at 3.7 percent, according to data collected by Property and Portfolio Research, an independent real estate research and advisory firm in Boston. It is expected to shrink to 3.3 percent by the end of this year and to 2.9 percent by 2011.

“It’s only going to get more difficult to rent an apartment in New York City,” said Andy Joynt, a real estate economist with the research firm. “While rents continue to rise, it’s not sending people out of the city. There’s still enough of a cachet,” he said.

While New York City has always had a vacancy rate lower than most other cities, rental prices jumped last year by a record 8.3 percent. Some potential buyers, scared by the national slowdown in housing sales, decided to rent instead of buy. The housing crunch has also been exacerbated by the steady growth of newcomers.

The relocation division of the brokerage company Prudential Douglas Elliman had found homes for 4,000 families moving to the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area in 2006, a 15 percent jump from the year before, and many of them wanted to live in Manhattan.

Stephen Kotler, executive vice president of the division, said he expected business to increase by 15 percent again this year, based on the requests he has already received from banks, consumer-products companies and media firms. Even though his clients can afford high rents, he said, they do not have many choices.

Even the rich are getting their asses handed to them.

“There’s going to be limited inventory and a lot of demand,” Mr. Kotler said. “There just hasn’t been enough rental product built,” he said, as, developers have said that the price of land and the costs of construction in the last few years have made it impractical to build rental buildings. They have instead focused on condominiums.

Renters without high salaries have not been shut out of the market. They are squeezing in extra roommates or making alterations as never before much to the frustration of landlords. The rents for one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan average $2,567 a month, and two-bedrooms average $3,854 a month, according to data from Citi Habitats, a large rental brokerage company, but rents tend to be far higher in coveted neighborhoods like the Upper West Side and TriBeCa.

Because landlords typically require renters to earn 40 times their monthly rent in annual income, renters of those average apartments would need to earn at least $102,680, individually or combined, to qualify for a one-bedroom and $154,160 to afford a two-bedroom.

Young people making a fraction of those salaries are doubling up in small spaces and creating housing code violations, said Jamie Heiberger-Jacobsen, a real estate lawyer with her own practice. She is representing landlords in 26 cases that claim overcrowding or illegal alterations in elevator buildings in Murray Hill, the Upper East and Upper West Sides and the Lower East Side. A year ago, she handled a half-dozen such cases.

Ms. Heiberger-Jacobsen said she was seeing the overcrowding not only in tenement-type buildings, but also in doorman buildings. “It really does create fire hazards,” she said. “You can’t just have beds all over the place.”

I have to side with Ms. Heiberger-Jacobsen. Just because you rent a place doesn’t mean you can do whatever the hell you want to it. Rules need to be followed and not because the adults want to ruin your fun but because it is for the safety of all who live there. Sure, it doesn’t seem like no harm is being committed when you violate a few fire codes, but it is only when the bodies pile up at the morgue that people realize why overcrowding and illegal alterations to a building are a bad thing.

But more renters are finding that they cannot afford to stay in the city without resorting to less conventional living arrangements. For the last five years, Mindy Abovitz, 27, a drummer and graphic designer, has been living with four roommates in a 1,500-square-foot loft with one bathroom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which has become a haven for young people, that rents for $2,600 a month.

Her rent is a bargain, she said, because comparable spaces now cost as much as $4,500 a month. To accommodate everyone, the roommates created five bedrooms out of three by building walls from drywall and lumber. Then they soundproofed the walls with carpet padding to limit the noise.

Dividing the space has been an affordable solution, Ms. Abovitz said, though the loft becomes crowded when she and her roommates get ready for work or prepare meals. “The kitchen and the bathroom are where you find the most traffic,” she said.

Those of you who dream of living in the big city, I implore you to do your homework. That means visiting the city and seeing how things really work. What Ms. Abovitz is describing is not something you do for a month or even a year, this something you do for a life. Especially if you do not have the financial resources to survive on your own or chose an occupation that is not known for its high salaries. New York City is an insanely expensive place to live and if you don’t have the dough, then you got to go.

For those of you who bought condos as investment properties, this is the opportunity to take advantage of the rental season this summer. There is a ton of qualified candidates out there so get your paperwork together and a good broker who can expedite the deal as quick as possible. And make sure you are crystal clear about the rental polices of your condo.

Students on tight budgets find it especially tough to find housing. Last fall, Kate Harvey, a part-time nanny and a junior at N.Y.U., and eight friends saved on rent by camping out in vacant offices at Michael Stapleton Associates, a downtown explosive-detection security firm. For nearly three months, they told the guards at 47 West Street that they were interns, even as they trudged in near midnight or pattered through the lobby at 10 a.m. in pajamas and slippers.

Ms. Harvey’s father, George Harvey, who is the chief executive of Michael Stapleton Associates, had lent them the space, which included two kitchens and two baths, after his company moved into a new office before the lease on its old one expired.

They sneaked furniture into the 11th floor on the freight elevator, squeezed three beds into the former chief executive’s office and turned filing cabinets into clothing drawers. One student pitched a tent. They brought their cat, Sula, past the front desk. They knew pets were allowed, they said, because the company had allowed bomb-sniffing dogs.

While most of the students who were interviewed said that they came from families that were fairly comfortable financially, they said that area rents were so high that they could not afford both housing and tuition.

“It was nine girls and a cat,” Ms. Harvey said, sipping on steamed milk in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. “At least three of the nine would have had a really hard time paying for school and staying there.”

Hey, here’s an idea. MAYBE YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE GONE TO NYU IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Mr. Harvey said his daughter told him that some friends had spent the summer sleeping on friends’ couches and even in the N.Y.U. library because they could not afford rent.

College is a 4, sometimes 5 year period where a young person gets educated and grows intellectually and spiritually. It is also a nonstop orgy of drinking and debauchery. Dealing with debt and trying to find a place is supposed to happen after graduation.

“They were in some tough financial situations,” Mr. Harvey said. “It occurred to me that all this space was going to waste.”

Mr. Harvey’s heart is in the right place. And who can blame the guy? He’s a Dad. And he wants to help his little girl. However I can’t condone what he has done. What he should have done was either tell his daughter to commute from home or transfer to another school. Or perhaps he should have rented her an apartment in the first place.

Ms. Harvey probably watched a lot of Sex and the City and became entranced with going to school in Manhattan. But if she was facing this amount of trauma trying to find housing, she should have just transferred to a SUNY, which btw are great schools and are at the fraction of the cost of NYU. In fact there are plenty of cheaper and better alternatives like Virginia Tech, Rutgers and City College. You need to seriously consider those options if you want to avoid the hardships of living in the city.

Even though the offices were vacant, a commercial lease was signed which most likely had provisions that disallowed this type of activity. So basically living there was illegal.

Remember my story about my art school? What if these girls had accidentally started a fire? What about the people working in the building? Even if the sprinklers go off and there is no loss of life what about the damages to the businesses of the other building’s tenants? What about the people who are employed by those businesses? If those business had to shut down those people would have been completely f**ked because a bunch of NYU students decided to play Martha Stewart in their offices.If those girls had hurt themselves or others while moving using the freight elevator, it is possible that the building’s insurance would not cover the illegal costs under those circumstances

Now, the closest I have to military experience is being a fan of GIJoe. But even someone who has read comics knows that you always keep your base of operations secure and if you even suspect that it has been compromised, you go into lockdown. That means you don’t allow your daughter and her friends bunk in your barracks, even if it is completely empty.

I am baffled that the parties involved have even allowed their identities to be revealed especially the one who works in a very sensitive arena. By blabbing about their exploits they are asking for serious trouble. If Mr. Harvey wants to move to another office space, whoever his potential landlord will be is going to be doing a background check on him and when he googles his name, I can guarantee you that this article will pop up.

Once his new commercial landlords finds out that Mr. Harvey likes to use his vacant offices as a college dormitory well, if they do not reject him outright, they will demand a ton of conditions to ensure that if Mr. Harvey decides to play RA then he will be penalized for his actions.

The people who become commercial landlords, go into commercial because they do not want to deal with the headaches associated with being a residential landlord. Like their residential counterparts, commercial landlords have a lot of f**king money. And if you are f**king with their investment they will carpet bomb you senseless with every legal option at their disposal. And they will win because as far as I know residential squatters rights do not apply in a commercial setting.

Now Ms. Harvey and two roommates from the office are looking for a new place to live. Each can spend up to $800 a month. Ms. Harvey has been searching the Craigslist Web site for apartments, but so far she has had no luck.

She says she is hopeful that they will eventually find something in Brooklyn, perhaps in the outer reaches of Park Slope. “We’re definitely going to have to expand our definition of Park Slope,” she said.

The only thing you are going to expand is your budget because with $2400 you will either get a closet in Parks Slope or you will all be living comfortably somewhere in Flushing that is a 20 minute bus ride to the 7 train. That is if your landlords are accepting of your past history of creative housing.